Mirepoix is worth it

Mirepoix is a weird looking word that doesn’t give away much hint of what it is. Pronounced “Meer pwah”, it is the secret to tasty cooking of soups, ragout, gravies and other European dishes.

We’ve been aware of it for some time and have spent many hours watching television chefs use a mirepoix without using the word. It was almost as if they didn’t know how to say it either! Finally Rick Stein pronounced it, you can always count on Rick!

Mirepoix is a mixture of finely chopped carrot, onion and celery. Varying the proportions of each can change the flavour but for the everyday cook, whatever amounts are handy usually works well.

The combination is also one of the reasons we have not used it all that much in the past because keeping celery in our fridge just to use for our mirepoix hasn’t worked as it goes old and limp. Now we are growing celery.

Celery is very easy to grow as we are not very green fingered and ours is growing brilliantly, even through a Christchurch frosty winter. This makes it simple to start a dish with the mirepoix as I can just grab a stalk of celery from the garden.

It adds great flavour and makes dishes taste more like restaurant food. We use it as a base for the meat ragout for lasagne or Spaghetti Bolognese. We put bigger chunks around meat if we are doing a roast towards the end of the cooking and then the gravy made from the pan is delicious. We use chunks of these three if we are making meat stocks too.

Once we’ve started, we’ve found it hard to stop but fortunately the celery just keeps growing.